Losing the plot?

   Following from my last Ark, which, you may remember made mention of our 38th wedding anniversary, I have been led to reflect a bit on the aging process. Kim commented on looking forward to the next 38, which caused me to reflect that we will be 116 years old if we make it, which strikes me as implausible. However, it`s not the gross length of life expectancy which concerns me but the HEALTHY life span remaining. Luckily, both Kim and I are fairly hale and hearty, even if a bit more weather-beaten than when we tied the knot. But what no one likes to mention is the fear of mental degradation.
  With cancer coming more under control of health professionals, the next great concern is the loss of memory. We know of at least two tragic cases and would hate to experience it at first-hand. I did mention to Kim some time ago that I kept forgetting names, but was comforted by her retort that I could NEVER remember them, even as a twenty-year-old! Nothing new there, then... Another comforting fact which I have read in several sources lately, is that bi-lingual people are much later in developing memory loss. The theory is that the brain gets so much healthy exercise remembering several thousand foreign words, that it is in a better position than the lesser-stressed monoglots. There, a new reason to learn your French!
  However, I did have a `senior moment` a few days ago. I was methodically processing some left-over stew into a nice soup. I ladled some of the stew into the food-processor from the casserole, spun it and then was going to tip the soup into a spare pan I had ready. However I poured it by mistake back into the casserole with the remaining stew... Not a bad error but it made me smile at my lack of attention and incidentally reminded me of this story.
  An American was telling of his father, who was a fantastically methodical man. One day, when he decided he needed a hair-cut, he visited his local barber. He entered the shop, removed his overcoat, put it on a hanger and hung it on the coat stand. He then did the same with his jacket, took off his tie, rolled it up and stowed it in his pocket. He unbuttoned his waist-coat, undid and loosened his shirt collar and took his place in the barber`s chair. The barber approached and said `Mr ---- , have you come for a hair-cut?` The father was surprised and said he had, rather crossly.  `Well, then` said the barber, `You are going to have to remove your hat` A case of not seeing the wood for the trees.

     Bye for now, going to enjoy life while I remember how!
   
 

Anyone fancy a good meal?

   

    Yesterday was our 38th wedding anniversary, and to commemorate all that (mainly) happy time, we decided to celebrate it in style with a meal out. To kill two birds with one stone, we decided also to try out the Restaurant du Canton in our next village of Longré.
  Funnily enough, although we are part of the canton of Loubillé, Longré is actually the nearer village, perhaps this is because it is over the Départment border in the Charente. The little café there closed a year ago, due I think, to a divorce and has only recently re-opened. It has been entirely refurbished by its new owners and offers a welcoming little bar area and a larger restaurant area, newly constructed under a most impressive conservatory at the rear of the bar. It is all very clean and pleasant, nice and warm, too on a rather chilly evening. The couple now running it are extremely welcoming and hospitable. They come from the Paris area.
  But what about the food, I hear you ask. Well, we were not disappointed. The menu is fairly simple, not surprising in a little establishment still in the process of building up its clientelle. Better a simple menu, than a great list of dishes not available or straight out of the microwave!.
   We started with an apero, as it was a special occasion. Kim had a Kir, and I had a white Pineau, both were excellent, and accompanied with the usual nibbles. Then came an entrée, not mentioned on the menu, which consisted of a delicious slice of quiche, with salad. After that, both Kim and I had chosen Escalope of Turkey with a Tarragon sauce. This was accompanied with delightfully light sautéd potatoes. Very tasty! Afterwards, for dessert we ate a creme brulée, which was one of the best I have ever tasted, with the creme still chilled and the caramelised brown sugar warm and crispy on the top.  We finished with a coffee in the bar area. The menu price, which includes a small carafe of wine and the coffee, was a very reasonable 12 Euros apiece. The meal was well-served on attractive square plates and the tables had proper linen cloths with a red satin runner.
  I`m sorry that I don`t have the nerve to photograph each dish, like someone we could name, you will have to take my word that it was all most attractively presented. Altogether a most enjoyable meal and we can thoroughly recommend this restaurant!
   Bye for now, all this talk of food has given me an appetite for lunch!

Autumn.

              This is the weather the shepherd shuns
              And so do I;
               When beeches drip in browns and duns
                And thresh and ply;
                And hill-hid tides throb, throe on throe,
                 And meadow rivulets overflow,
                  And drops on gate-bars hang in a row,
                  And rooks in families homeward go,
                   And so  do I.


   Walking the dogs up the track earlier this morning, this second verse of Thomas Hardy came to mind. I too, made haste to cut the mandatory dog exercise short and return to the warm kitchen, where the wood-burner is keeping things snug and dry.
   And yet, it`s not cold and it is a magnificent sight to see the golden leaves streaming to leeward as the tall trees shed their dangerous wind-resistance. All is in order in the countryside and in due course we will be able to say ` This is the weather the Cuckoo likes` again.
  And in fact, a bit of blue sky up to windward has spread, and the sun is out again, better conditions for the afternoon, I expect!

  Bye for now, I hope your weather is being kind to you!

Vive la Différence?

 There are many advantages, and of course, some disadvantages, in living in France, and readers of this blog will have heard me enumerate them often enough. The climate, chiefly (we are sitting with the front door open to the autumn sunshine) the cheaper and of course rural life etc. There are no doubt disadvantages, though I can`t at the moment think of them... Then there are differences which may be one or the other.. One of the differences which anyone renovating a French house will encounter, is the electrical system.
  Now the British system is relatively recent and is of course different to everyone else in the world, quelle surprise!. It is built around the well known 13 amp square-pinned plug. In effect, each appliance connected to the system has its own fuse. The power can therefor be supplied by loops serving many plug sockets or lights. Each loop has its own big fuse back at the main distribution board. The advantage is that only a few wires come out of the main board. The disadvantage is a large unwieldy plug which won`t fit any other known socket on earth...
  In France, this loop system is not only not seen, it is illegal. The plugs are not fused, and look tiny to British eyes, especially the smaller ones for small, twin wired items. If the iten needs an earth, the plug is a little bigger, as you can see in the header pic. The disadvantage is that the circuits are fused back at the main board, so each socket, or say up to three, have a separate spur of wire, and the bunch of wires coming out of the main board have to be seen to be believed! Both systems work, both have their points, you pays your money and.... in fact you have no choice! It`s a draw...
   The other major system difference is the hot water supply. In Britain, the water for your shower is heated by gas or electricity straight from cold, as you use it. Advantage-- unlimited supply, available straightaway. Disadvantage, low rates of flow, especially in winter, when the mains water is very cold. You have a choice between a trickle of hot water, or a good flow of luke warm, neither very appealing! Plus, in France, the electricity supply is generally too low to run an electric shower heater, as we found out to our cost when we tried to install one.
 The alternative in France is to have your shower supplied from the hot water tank. We get all the very hot water one could desire at the shower-head. Simple, but impossible in the UK!  The reason is that Uk hot water tanks are at atmospheric pressure, while in France they are at mains pressure, by having the cold supply connected to the tank, illegal in Britain, for fear that there will be a reverse flow which might contaminate the supply. Some genius in France has suggested that a non-return valve could solve this, rocket science or what! The problem of over-pressure of the tank was solved by a small pressure-relief valve, shown in my pic to vent off a small amount of water . The result--steaming hot, copious showers, what luxury!  Vive la différence!

   Bye for now, off to enjoy a shower!

Lost in translation.

   One of the joys and one of the problems of living in France is the different language. I have heard recent ex-pats bewailing the language `problem` but I prefer to look at it as an advantage. When we first started to come to France on holidays, it always seemed more `foreign` more exotic than staying safely in anglophone G B. Now we live here full-time, I still feel a certain thrill in being able to chat to French people, without difficulty unless their accent is really bizarre or they speak really too quickly. Sure, there are hitches that can occur, such as a visit to the Tax Office or the dentist, where specialised vocabulary can be needed but you can often swot up in advance. In a larger sense, this is what we did before moving here, taking several years of evening classes to prepare our French. Now I take a pride in finding the best translation of a French sentence, we even are shared translators for our local village magazine, when the Maire expressed an interest in having his monthly column translated to reach the ten per cent of his citoyens who are English. True, you can nowadays have an instantaneous translation by computer, but this is not without its pitfalls.
  I was reminded of this some time ago, when reading a Tom Clancey novel translated from the American (that`s what it said in the aknowledgments) into French. I was doing this as a practice, having read it in English some time previously. A sentence brought me up short in my tracks. The French read `Le Général entra en hate, portant une chemise en carton`  Which I mentally translated, quite correctly, as `The General strode in, wearing a cardboard shirt.` Had his laundry overdone the starch, I wondered, or was this some French figure of speech with which I was unfamiliar... On reflection, I worked out that the French verb `porter` could mean to wear OR to carry and chemise can mean file or folder as well as cardboard. I bet Google would have given me the first version, however!
   I recently read yet another advantage of being bi-lingual. The effort and extra neurones needed by the brain to do this, provide a certain protection against developing Alzheimer`s Disease. Speakers of two languages, who are prone to the syndrome, develop it on average several years later than their monoglot  contemporaries. Perhaps I should rush off and study another language, I could live lucid for ever!

  Bye for now, going to see if I can find my old German dictionary!

Sunday trip out--L`Ile d`Oléron.

   We have been confined close to home for a week or so, both by the weather, which has been very rainy though mild, and by the fact that I have had a nasty cold for the past week. We both felt a little stale and decided to take a trip out on Sunday, even though the Météo was not very promising. As we both miss the sea, we decided to visit the Ile d`Oléron, our favourite seaside location. In the UK we lived mostly at Portsmouth or Plymouth, within easy reach of the sea. Indeed at Hooe, one of our houses you could walk to the beach in 20 minutes. Although we love living here in the countryside in France, we do occasionally need a `fix` of sea air! Even though it`s a two-hour drive!
  However, first things first, we always plan to have a MacDonalds at Marrennes before venturing onto the island, so we set the GPS to go via St Jean dAngély to add a bit of interest. The weather was showery when we set out, but fortune smiled on us and it brightened steadily towards the afternoon.
  After our meal, we headed towards the impressive bridge onto the Ile. Oléron is the second biggest offshore island of France after Corsica, and is an intriguing mixture of tourist and holiday trade and the shellfish industry. Along the shores are many tidal pools where the oysters are parked to purge them after being fished up out of the sea and the little painted wooded huts of the oyster farmers. There are also several fishing ports, very picturesque with typical single-storey cottages. There are also large quantities of holiday homes, some big secluded hotels, riding schools, all sorts of aids to having a good time in the Summer. There is even a lengthy narrow-gauge railway, which has its own fire-waggon! The St Trojan Railway also runs trains which don`t need rails!

  We like best the beach near St Trojan called Grande Plage, which is on the seaward side of the island. The beach is miles long, of golden sand and the surf crashes on it in spectacular fashion. See the header pic for a view. You approach the beach through half a mile of pine forest with frequent picnic spots and eventually arrive at a parking spot from where you walk out of the forest over the dunes to the shoreline. The wind was bracing to say the least and you could see the fine sand drifting along the surface as the dune slowly migrated inland! We had a walk along the shore admiring the surf. A school of sand yachting was teaching some young pupils how to manage their swift-sailing `boats`.

Gatseau Plage

Sea holly and `horses tails growing above the beach

  Although we loved the views, the wind was very chilling, so after half an hour we retreated to the car to warm up and drove off through the forest. We decided to visit another beach new to us, on the lee-side of the island, Gatseau plage. Although the approach was similar, through the pine forest, the beach was far more sheltered though it lacked, of course, the spectacular surf. There was a huge thallaso-therapy hotel further along, and I felt the place would be nicer to swim in in the summer, though not now!
  As it was four o`clock, we decided to head for home as it is a two hour drive and it gets dark early now. We went home direct, or fairly so, as the GPS was not aware of a length of new dual carriageway towards Royan, and thus could not advise us when to turn off it. The poor machine was under the impression we were driving across country and kept asking us to `rejoindre une route.`
  We arrived home in the dusk, tired but having vastly enjoyed our day out.









Bye for now, we`ll tell you when we next go on tour!

Turn on the Heat.

   Well it`s that time of year again, the faithful Franco- Belge wood-burner has been re-lit and won`t go out until March apart, perhaps for a few days at Christmas. It`s muttering away to itself, keeping the kitchen warm and spilling its welcome warmth into the rest of the house. It`s also heating three kettles, two large ones a neighbour gave us years ago and a new one Kim bought in England to use for making tea. The large hot-plate top surface is useful for cooking, too. I lit it three days ago and it has kept in well overnight twice now and I am re-discovering the art of getting the best from it.
  Not that lighting up is a matter of throwing a switch!  First I had to sweep the chimney with the sweeps brush and rods. Then the stove itself needed a good clear out of the soot and clinker accumulated inside it. Then I pre-heated the firebox with a hot air stripper. This sounds a bit over the top but I have found it a wise precaution, without which a reverse draught can set in, filling the kitchen or even the whole house with choking smoke. Then it`s just a case of dry kindling and a couple of fire-lighters and it was away!
  Or you could look further back, to the delivery of five steres of logs a few weeks ago and their stacking in the barn, or to more recently in the cutting of the older logs with the electric chain-saw. Slightly to my apprehension, Kim has undertaken to do this for the moment, though in fact she is probably more practiced in this than I am, she would never let me use our small Black and Decker saw in Plymouth...
   If all this seems a great deal of trouble, I suppose it is, but we both feel a strong satisfaction in heating the house in this way. It seems more French somehow, more country-life. The house feels drier and there`s a satisfying tang of woodsmoke in the air. If the time ever comes when we cannot do it, we will be very sad.
  Bye for now, going to put dinner on the stove!